“I just got his phone number from his dad and I called him and I said, ‘Conan, would you like to do this?’” Kim said. “And he said that he’d refused every time before, but he feels like now he’s got a lot to say.”

Ironically, Jeffrey Immelt, the CEO of O'Brien's former employer at GE, is a graduate of Dartmouth's class of '78.

“You know that Conan had some conflict with NBC and its owner General Electric, but he and [Immelt] are still good friends,” Kim said. “No problem there.”